Viewers rule Brenneman's Tuesday night series is a hit

Despite her keen involvement, though, she hadn't yet been to the studio when shooting began in July.

"So I show up for work at Paramount," she recalls. "It's 5:45 and I can't find our stages or anybody I know."

For a while she explores the fabled Hollywood lot. Then she sees the hallway of the courthouse the Hartford, Conn., courthouse where Judge Amy Gray will soon preside.

For a moment, she admires the set. "And then I start to cry. Because it's well, before, it was all just an idea. And now: Look at the wonderful job these people did!"

Exhilaration! Team pride! It's quite a different image than viewers got a few weeks later when "Judging Amy" premiered. After a sleepless night before her first day as a Juvenile Court judge, Amy Gray stands at her bedroom mirror in her judge's robe and panics. Diving back into bed, she pulls the covers over her head.

Viewers clearly liked what they saw on the premiere and thereafter. Starting strong, "Judging Amy," (which airs at 9 p.m. Tuesdays on KLBK-TV Channel 13, Cox Cable Channel 7), has emerged as the season's highest-rated new drama, ranking 13th among all prime-time shows.

It's not so hard to understand. Amy Gray, a newly divorced single mom, has left behind Manhattan, marriage and corporate law to move back to Hartford with her 6-year-old daughter, and back into her childhood home. There she resumes her complicated relationship with her mother (Tyne Daly), a hard-nosed social worker. And she becomes reacquainted with her brother (Dan Futterman), a free-spirited novelist still somehow tied down.

This is a warm, comfy series with a strong sense of place. And at its heart is Amy, whose challenges at age 35 are widely shared. By no means old but beyond unqualified youth, with wounds and entanglements, she is trying to make a fresh start without a clean slate.

If there are obvious differences between this Amy and her surefooted creator, other distinctions mount up between Brenneman and the TV role in which she first caught the audience's eye.

That character, of course, was rookie Officer Janice Licalsi, sizzling paramour of Detective John Kelly in the first season of "NYPD Blue." Both sexy and homicidal, Licalsi was too hot to handle, even for that groundbreaking series. Besides, Brenneman's mopey leading man, David Caruso, had ankled the show. To no one's surprise, Licalsi was written out early the second year.

But despite subsequent films such as "Heat" and the just-released "The Suburbans," Brenneman longed for a series again. "I wanted to work with a writer who can go deeper with the character each week."

The series Brenneman envisioned came from her own background in Hartford with her mother, Supreme Court Judge Frederica Brenneman (who, now semiretired, serves the series as a technical adviser).

"I wanted it to be in part about work," says Brenneman, "but also to explore what it's like after work, when you go home."

After CBS signed on, a script was written. But no one, Brenneman included, liked it. Then, by chance, she was put together with Barbara Hall, whose writing and producing credits include "I'll Fly Away," "Northern Exposure" and "Chicago Hope."

In five days last February, Hall conjured up a new pilot script (and earned herself an executive producer title). It was shot by Brenneman's husband, Brad Siberling, who had directed the 1998 feature "City of Angels."

By then, Brenneman had seen "Providence," NBC's midseason hit which, like "Amy," features a slinky, curly-haired divorcee (on "Providence," a doctor played by Maria Kanakaredes) who moves back home to tangle with her family and find herself.

"But I knew that our show was going to be really different," Brenneman says. "Ours is not quite as sentimental. It's a little more speedy and cerebral and neurotic."